D&D 4E 4E: DM-proofing the game

Kamikaze Midget said:

I think it is key to note that this is not an acceptable answer for WotC.

I mean, they WANT people to be playing.

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That doesn't mean those players won't be playing -- it means the DM who decides "fiat" means "license to be a jerk" will be out of players. Ostensibly, those player's who left the jerk DM crying in his viking hat will either get another DM or one of them will step up to the plate and do the job.

Reynard said:

One of the implicit design goals of 4E seems to be to reduce the influence the DM has over the game, particularly as it relates to "fun".

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Reynard, I agree more or less completely, and am a little surprised at some of the disagreement you're getting from people like Cadfan and Hussar.

Mustrum_Ridcully said:

I disagree with the idea of "taking powers from the GM and giving it to the players" on the basis that it seems to assume that the GM is in a adversial role to the players. But he is not.

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But there is a tension at any RPG table over who has narrative control. And 4e hands more of it the players, at the expense of the GM.

I've actually posted about this a couple of times now in some recent threads, but I'll risk a repost:

The major changes from AD&D to 3E were two: sophisticated character build rules, and sophisticated action resolution rules. The first set of rules gave players lots of options they hitherto had lacked, thus transferring narrative control in the game from designers to players. The second set of rules brought an end to the GM's special role in AD&D as an arbiter of action success via direct negotiation with the players. This transferred narrative control from the GM to the players. (And there have been a lot of complaints about this.)

4e basically picks up where 3E left off - nearly every change from the previous editions is intended to transfer narrative control in one of these two directions. In particular, 4e:


All of this facilitate gamist play, by stopping the GM and the game designers getting in the way of the players' pursuit of system excellence. Interesting, it also facilitates narrativist play, by making adversity in the game, and its resolution, something much more shared between players and GM in a potentially co-operative fashion, than something almost entirely under the GM's control (as was the case in AD&D to a significant extent).

pemerton said:

But there is a tension at any RPG table over who has narrative control. And 4e hands more of it the players, at the expense of the GM.

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Ummm the players are the only ones who've ever had narrative control. The DM has control over the setting but the story lies entirely in the hands of the players.


If you don't wan the PCs to jump over a pit you don't randomly remove abilities from your players, you make the pit wider. Setting is the DMs - if he wants a 40ft wide pit that nobody can jump over then thats his business. But no matter what edition or even game system you're running the story of how the players got past the pit is entirely under their control.

If they want to run away, climb over it, fly over it or dig around it then the choice is theirs - they may need to check the setting allows their chosen action but the CHOICE is theirs.

I'm glad that the game is designed to give more narrative control to the players. It's fine by me, and I'm pretty much the perpetual GM of my group. I like it when the players add to the narrative. Some of my favorite moments have been the result of the players taking the initiative and defining the world in some way. I welcome their hopefully increased input.

BeauNiddle said:

Ummm the players are the only ones who've ever had narrative control. The DM has control over the setting but the story lies entirely in the hands of the players.


If you don't wan the PCs to jump over a pit you don't randomly remove abilities from your players, you make the pit wider. Setting is the DMs - if he wants a 40ft wide pit that nobody can jump over then thats his business. But no matter what edition or even game system you're running the story of how the players got past the pit is entirely under their control.

If they want to run away, climb over it, fly over it or dig around it then the choice is theirs - they may need to check the setting allows their chosen action but the CHOICE is theirs.

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I am not sure that you are understanding his meaning of narrative control, which is about who is controlling events (and even setting) in the story.

For instance. A character wants to buy a +1 sword from the shopkeeper:

If the DM says the shopkeeper doesn't have any +1 swords, then the DM is using narrative control.

If the player (or character) has an ability that allows him to say that this shopkeep definitely has a +1 sword, then the player has narrative control.

another instance (from BW)...

Generally the DM introduces NPCs and stats them out, this means he has narrative control over the emergence of NPCs and basically what they can do.

In Burning Wheel a player can make a circles roll and introduce an NPC of his choosing into the story (the success of the roll determines if the NPC is for or against the players goals).

A last example.... The players want to find dirt on some NPC..They break into his house and break into his safe to find stuff to blackmail hiim. If there is or is not blackmail material in the safe it is under the DMs narrative control.

In other systems that give narrative control to the player, them succeeding at this challenge MEANS that there definitely IS blackmail material in the safe (meaning the Players had narrative control), the DM cannot make the challenge have an empty or unfulfilling resolution by then declaring, there is no blackmail material existent.

To some extent narrative control means that at different points the DM or the Players both have control over events and also the setting.

It used to be such that the DM always had the vast majority of narrative control, this has changed with the development and evolution of game designs.

Apop

pemerton said:

Reynard, I agree more or less completely, and am a little surprised at some of the disagreement you're getting from people like Cadfan and Hussar.


But there is a tension at any RPG table over who has narrative control. And 4e hands more of it the players, at the expense of the GM.

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Whenever I see your name, i always think of the those freaky half-bird, half-deer things from the AD&D MM1 (they always freaked me out)

BeauNiddle said:

Ummm the players are the only ones who've ever had narrative control. The DM has control over the setting but the story lies entirely in the hands of the players.

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The above statement is more-or-less self-contradictory - as your following remarks condedes:

BeauNiddle said:

If you don't wan the PCs to jump over a pit you don't randomly remove abilities from your players, you make the pit wider.

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Which is to say, the GM has primary control over the narrative, by deciding what is or isn't possible in the gameworld.

BeauNiddle said:

But no matter what edition or even game system you're running the story of how the players got past the pit is entirely under their control.

If they want to run away, climb over it, fly over it or dig around it then the choice is theirs - they may need to check the setting allows their chosen action but the CHOICE is theirs.

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First, you'll note that a lot of the posters in this thread say that it's up to the GM what actions are permitted (eg by controlling or limiting class or race seleciton, magic items, spell availability, money availability, equipment availability,etc).

Second, if the CHOICE involves getting NPCs involved, nearly every poster criticising Reynard also thinks that it's up to the GM to determine what NPCs there are in the world, how they respond to the PCs, whether or not they'll help, and if so how much and by what means.

So the narrative control you're talking about is the players' choice of solutions from a list defined by the GM (and/or the game designers), in order to resolve a problem or challenge decided by the GM (and/or the game designers, in the case of a module), with the consequences of success or failure also decided by the GM (and/or the game designers, in the case of a module).

I guess no RPG can strip away that degree of control without becoming a novel, or a railroad so blatant no one would play it.

What I'm talking about is mechanics that shift the narrative control to the players in all sorts of ways that AD&D never did, and 3E does only partially. To the list I gave above, I'll add an additional feature pointed out by Reynard:


The principal difference between Reynard and me is that he thinks these changes are bad, whereas I think they're good.

That's not to say that AD&D was a bad game. But it made assumptions about play that are simply no longer true for most D&D players:


Like 4e, this approach implies a setting and can produce fun play for those willing to work within those presumptions. But since about the mid-1980s (ie when AD&D started to go down a non-dungeoneering, simulationist/world-building path) they have not held very widely across the gaming community.

EDIT: Apoptosis, you beat me to it on the narrative control thing! Do you have an opinion on whether my analysis of 4e, and it's difference from earlier editions, is right?

Btw, the name is just my yahoo email address, which I cut and pasted when I made an account here: my real name is Patrick Emerton. And I've got no resemblance to an Peryton living or dead!

It also requires players to have a lot of trust in their GM. Often that trust will be misplaced. This is why, IMO, AD&D has a unique reputation among RPGs for producing abusive GMing.

pemerton said:

EDIT: Apoptosis, you beat me to it on the narrative control thing! Do you have an opinion on whether my analysis of 4e, and it's difference from earlier editions, is right?

Btw, the name is just my yahoo email address, which I cut and pasted when I made an account here: my real name is Patrick Emerton. And I've got no resemblance to an Peryton living or dead!

It also requires players to have a lot of trust in their GM. Often that trust will be misplaced. This is why, IMO, AD&D has a unique reputation among RPGs for producing abusive GMing.

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I agree with what you wrote, I think you also made a good point that I believe (have no way of knowing) that they did it for gamist concerns and they ended up with some additional narrative benefits by accident. The only thing i would add is some of these decisions give power to the rules (not the most eloquent way of saying this) and not either the players or the DM

Originally D&D was a vague mixture of game and simulation. 3E was more gamist and 4E appears more so.

1E DM had most the power

3E the rules (you actually said it better when you said game designer)have most the power (the players have some based on character creation and development)

4E I think the rules have most the power as well, though an unforseen benefit of this is that the players may also get more narrative power.

This goes back to the difference in jumping skill which was on another thread....

One system just sets a difficulty based of what the DM (and/or players) think it is...easy, hard, crazy etc.

A rules-based system would base the difficulty off of the actual length of the jump.

I think rules-based way is generally not very good design for a game because it is really pretty irrelevant what the distance is (and frankly the distances given are not really modeled off of reality at best you can say they are consistent).

This off course will lead to rules-lighter games which may or may not be in the best interest of the designers.

pemerton said:

4e basically picks up where 3E left off - nearly every change from the previous editions is intended to transfer narrative control in one of these two directions.

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I disagree with this claim. With one exception, every one of your examples of how 4e will turn narrative power over to the players are trivial in comparison to their actual role: to strengthen worldbuilding and in some cases, even turn the narrative power over to the DM.

Making monsters more recognizable and distinctive: it has been noted explicitly that monster design will be exception based with fewer design restrictions on the DM. Classes of monsters will no longer be created in the type based methods that led to simple blocks of traits shared by all members of that type. This and more spontaneous monster design will just as often decrease predictablilty for player decisions. The DM will be encouraged to give creatures those traits that lead to good encounters with less regard to the systematic PC-like generation systems of 3e.

Rebalancing magic items and encounter build rules: This one really baffles me. The intent is to allow DMs a better chance of estimating the challenge of an encounter. An improved ability here is now claimed to somehow increase player narrative power by preventing *accidental* DM unbalanced choices. So giving the DM better tools to predict the difficulty of an encounter *decreases* the DM's narrative power, despite the fact that he is the one responsible for all of the encounters. That is truly perverse reasoning.

Introducing Second Wind rules and making APs core: Here is an option that I do think will place more narrative power in the hands of the players. I do not find it particularly compelling as an argument that the 4e design is somehow intended to transfer narrative power to players as an overall goal, however.

Giving all PCs per-encounter abilities: This allows the DM to now pace adventures and encounters to his own wishes, rather than restrict them to the vagaries of his player's choices in the use of their limited resources. Have we all forgotten the infamous "15-minute adventuring day?" Or are we now claiming that it represented a triumph of DM narrative power that has been overturned? With limited per day resources, the players are fully capable of exhausting them, leaving the DM with the choice to either overwhelm them or allow them to rest. With per encounter abilities, the DM controls the pacing of encounters just as he always should: during the creation and placement of the encounters in the gameworld. The DM decides when and how the encounters trigger, not the players.

Introducing the PoL assumption that PoLs are safehavens until the players choose to trigger adversity. Considering that this is not a rule, but a suggestion for worldbuilding, this hardly seems to transfer narrative control over to the players any more than the assumption that PoL settings will have less area understood by the players and under PC-friendly control and more of the map under the DM's exclusive understanding and control makes the reverse.

FourthBear said:

Rebalancing magic items and encounter build rules: This one really baffles me. The intent is to allow DMs a better chance of estimating the challenge of an encounter. An improved ability here is now claimed to somehow increase player narrative power by preventing *accidental* DM unbalanced choices. So giving the DM better tools to predict the difficulty of an encounter *decreases* the DM's narrative power, despite the fact that he is the one responsible for all of the encounters. That is truly perverse reasoning.

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Actually this is really giving power to the rules and neither the player or the DM.

A system that allowed the players to pick their challenges would give power to the players.